Field of the Invention
The invention is in the fields of mechanical engineering and construction, especially mechanical construction, for example automotive engineering, aircraft construction, shipbuilding, machine construction, toy construction etc. In particular, it relates to a method of anchoring a connector in a first object and of—mechanically—securing a second object to a first object.
Description of Related Art
In the automotive, aviation, furniture and other industries, there has been a tendency to move away from steel constructions and to use lightweight building components. An example of such elements are lightweight building elements that include two outer, comparably thin building layers, for example of a fiber composite, such as a glass fiber composite or carbon fiber composite, a sheet metal or also, depending on the industry, of a fiberboard, and a middle layer (interlining) arranged between the building layers, for example a cardboard honeycomb structure or a lightweight metallic foam. Lightweight building elements of this kind may be referred to as “sandwich boards” and are sometimes called “hollow core boards (HCB)”. They are mechanically stable, may look pleasant and have a comparably low weight.
However, because the building layers are thin and the interlining is not suitable for anchoring a connector—such as a dowel—in it, it is difficult to attach an object to the lightweight building elements other than by an adhesive bond to the surface.
To meet these challenges, the automotive, aviation and other industries have started heavily using adhesive bonds. Adhesive bonds can be light and strong but suffer from the disadvantage that there is no possibility to long-term control the reliability, since a degrading adhesive bond, for example due to an embrittling adhesive, is almost impossible to detect without entirely releasing the bond. Also, adhesive bonds may lead to a rise in manufacturing cost, both, because of material cost and because of delays caused in manufacturing processes due to slow hardening processes, especially if the surfaces to be connected to each other have certain roughness and as a consequence the quickly hardening thin-layer adhesives cannot be used.